Sunday, August 07, 2011

People mourn the polar bear?

A group of young Britons travelled to a remote part of Norway. There were polar bears in the area, so they set up trip wires to scare them off before retiring to bed in their tents. But the wires failed and a bear attacked them, killing one young man and injuring others. During the struggle for life, one of the British men was able to shoot the polar bear.

What is the reaction of Daily Mail readers? Many of them are mourning the polar bear and simply ignoring the death of a young man:

Daniel: Sadly today we are one more polar bear less due to human infringement.

JD: How dare they kill that beautiful animal! They were in the bear's habitat so must take the consequences.

Lucy: How dare they kill the Polar Bear..... This infuriates me!!!!

Bright & Sparking: Yet another example or the most disgusting animal on this planet.. the human being..

Paula: Poor Polar bear....RIP...

Tom: Poor polar bear

Sadie: As usual - a wild animal is killed for displaying its natural behaviour. What an ignorant and selfish species the human race is.

I enjoy nature a great deal. I chose to live in an outer suburb where we've been visited by koalas, echidnas, blue tongues, parrots of all kinds - we've even had kangaroos hopping down our street.

But I can't help but think something is wrong here. Why would your first reaction not be regret for the loss of life of a promising young man? Why put polar bears above humans?

If any of my readers disagree I'd be happy to consider their arguments. But it seems to me that this reaction of mourning the bear and not the human reveals not so much a love of nature but a diminished attitude toward mankind.

Modern forms of humanism seem to lead not to a warm and appreciative account of what humans are, but to a negative and hostile one.

15 comments:

Humans do not matter, we have dominated our environment to make things better for ourselves.

This was how we spread as a species.

We are not big or strong or fast, it was a matter of banding into close knit groups and dominating and "exploiting" the local environment in order to make a world where more of our own would be able to live.

Now children are so brainwashed from such an early age to see animals as the equal of humans that such sanity is breaking down. It happened to me years ago, it is much stronger now.

Thankfully such muddled thinking seems to mostly be confined to young women and public employees.

I highly recommend the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, which is about the life and death of Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell pretty much embodied the fanaticism that permeates the left-wing environmentalist movement today. At one point he states emphatically that he would die to protect the animals he loved. Eventually he and his girlfriend were eaten by one of them.

Looking at the pictures of Svalbard, I am baffled why anyone would want to visit such a barren wasteland.

It looks quite beautiful to me. It's a matter of perspective. Many people look at my own homeland of the Sonoran Desert and see nothing but desolation. For me, every yard of it is absolutely magnificent.

My mother and I both said "Awwwww" at the picture of the cat at the same time. But we both stayed silent on the humans.

Then we started laughing at the ridiculousness of what we had just done!

I think the reason why I do that is because I've been around enough to realize that humans grow up to screw you over, whereas domesticated animals love you unconditionally.

I will say though that when I see a child who is blonde/blue eyed like myself I have the "awwww" reaction (especially under 7 years old.) But other children I do not have a warm reaction to. Which is even more reason why I have to marry someone as close to me genetically as possible.

As far as a wild animal...Well...I'm not stupid!! Polar Bears are wild and will rip your face off. They are not your friends. I don't get cuddly emotions over non-domesticated animals.

It's a hierarchy of caring for me based upon who is most likely to screw me over in real life. So yeah, some animals rank higher.

As James says, this sort of misanthropy is quite common among environmentalists. Whenever a person begins to bemoan "anthropocentrism" or "speciesism," we should, perhaps, treat them like an inanimate object. They probably don't really mean it, but what they are saying is that they no longer recognize humanity as a moral community, and recognition of humanity as a moral community is the price of admission to that community.

Empathy for animals doesn't come from humanism. It's an instinct. An instinct that more often than not collides with liberalism.

We're at loggerheads with the left and their cultural relativism at least as much as we have problems with the right. Barely a day goes past when Animals Australia or similar groups don't get lambasted as 'racist' by the left.

The real green movement has similar problems.

Our enemies are equally right wing humanists like some of the commenters above who believe in the universal goodness of man vis-a-vis nature and the lefty liberals who want Africa to overpopulate and China to continue skinning dogs alive.